1. Field of Invention
This invention generally relates to systems and methods for managing web pages.
2. Description of Related Art
Creating and updating web pages, managed and created by page authors, may rely on systems that support group work by allowing group members to view and modify shared information from their individual workstations. Group members may be required to install several types of software tools, where each tool manages a different type of information, in order to share group context that is needed to perform group activities. Therefore, group members require training to understand each tool. Since each tool often runs a separate window, group members must also manage limited screen space while copying content between applications.
There has been other work on recognizing structures in HTML. For example, a number of authors have described work on extracting information from tables and lists in HTML documents. However, these systems focus on extracting information from web pages for use in databases and data mining, while this invention uses the extracted information instead for the automatic construction of Web-writeable pages.
There are many existing approaches to keeping web pages up to date. A user, page author or group member can use a direct manipulation web page editor, such as, for example, Microsoft's FrontPage® or Macromedia's Dreamweaver®, a collaboration server, such as, for example, Wiki®, or a database-driven web application builder, such as, for example, Zope®. However, all of these approaches either require leaving the web browser used to access or view the web page, require learning a mark-up language and/or the like, cause access and version control problems and/or require writing custom software. Sparrow Web, which is a web page managing tool available from Xerox, provides an attractive alternative, particularly for authors who need to make frequent small changes to pages, or for group members who share responsibility for updating and/or managing a web page.